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Some of the best-loved works of English literature are being put to unexpected new uses at the University of Toronto.

A team of researchers has subjected the fiction of Agatha Christie, P.D. James and Iris Murdoch to computer analysis to shed new light on the hidden pathologies of the aging human brain. Among their findings is the revelation that Christie probably suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

The work of Ian Lancashire, an English professor, and Graeme Hirst, a computational linguist, topped the New York Times' year-end list of the notable ideas of 2009.

Lancashire's specialty is the esoteric field of neuro-cognitive literary theory – in his words "what science says about the creative process versus what authors report about how they create their books." He started to apply computer analysis to literary texts in 1982.

"This was a very weird and novel idea at the time; Ian was one of the first to think about doing this," says Hirst, who teaches computer science. We are talking in Lancashire's office in the Robarts Library along with a third researcher, graduate student Xuan Le.

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In addition, Dr. Regina Jokel, a researcher and language pathologist at Baycrest Hospital, contributed her knowledge of neuroscience to the team.

Lancashire, Hirst and Le have documented and graphed how written vocabulary declines precipitously, repetition increases, and the use of vague expressions such as "thing," "anything," "something" and "all sorts of things" multiplies in the writings of authors who develop Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's is just one of several types of dementia. "Not every patient presents with the same symptoms," explains Jokel. It's difficult to distinguish Alzheimer's from other language-based dementias such as primary progressive aphasia (PPA), she says. "Alzheimer's progresses faster, and all cognitive functions deteriorate at the same rate: memory, executive function, attention, concentration and judgment in addition to language."

Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999 at the age of 79, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease about five years earlier. "She was at a conference in Israel and suddenly she had nothing to say," says Lancashire. Her last novel, Jackson's Dilemma, appeared in 1995, studded with childishly simple sentences and ever shorter chapters.

"She called it writer's block, but it got worse; it was published only because she was Iris Murdoch," says Lancashire. "Reviews were mixed: A.S. Byatt said it was very poor but other reviewers called it economical, pared down, a triumph." No editor could have helped, since Murdoch allowed no one to change a word.

Whatever its quality as fiction, Lancashire calls her last book "a Rosetta Stone" for neuro-linguistic research.

British neuroscientist Peter Garrard, who had performed an autopsy on Murdoch's brain and noted the characteristic plaques and tangles of Alzheimer's, was the first to try to measure the decline of her late-life written vocabulary.

Lancashire decided to apply his methods to another long-lived writer, Agatha Christie.

Christie wrote her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, when she was 28, and over the next 54 years she produced some 80 works of fiction, plays and travel writings. She died at 85 as the world's best-selling fiction author of all time, according to the Guinness World Records.

Her last two mysteries, Elephants Can Remember and Postern of Fate, were written when she was 81 and 82, and Lancashire set about reading them.

"I hadn't read anything by Christie written after the 1930s, and I was shocked by what I found," the professor recalls. He got the books scanned so that the language used in them could be analyzed. In the end, with the help of a research grant from Google, he examined 16 novels selected from each decade of Christie's writing life.

"Peter Garrard found (in Iris Murdoch) what he expected to find, but Ian found what he didn't expect to find with Agatha Christie," comments Hirst, who signed on to help Lancashire develop more precise computational methods. For instance, to get around the problem that the books differed in length, and the longer books might naturally contain more word types, only the first 50,000 words of each book were considered.

The professors found that Elephants Can Remember represents a staggering 31 per cent drop in vocabulary compared to Destination Unknown, written 18 years earlier, when Christie was 63. Repetitions also increased, and the use of "thing" words was four times as frequent in her final book as in her first.

Christie's biographers have described the confusion and anger of her final years, which she spent in a wheelchair after breaking her hip. In one fit of fury she cut off all her hair, and her conversation did not always make sense. But she was never diagnosed with dementia, and no autopsy was performed after her 1976 death.

Grad student Xuan Le extended the computer analysis to include 20 novels by Iris Murdoch and 15 mystery novels by P.D. James, who is still producing page-turners at the age of 89. James's linguistic prowess turns out to be undiminished, providing a sort of one-woman control group of the healthy aged. Her vocabulary also turns out to be much more extensive than either of the two other writers'.

Does James know that computers in Toronto are looking into her brain? "No, we don't think she does, but if she contacts us, we'll tell her the news is good," Hirst says.

The hope of the research team is that their work will result in a diagnostic method that can spot the onset of Alzheimer's much earlier, when physical and mental exercise, along with new medications and improved nutrition, might slow its progression.

"If you had writing samples from the patient going back five or 10 years you could compare it to the current writing style," Jokel says.

"Most people in future will have an online record of blogs, memos and emails that could provide material," adds Lancashire, whose next subject will be Ross Macdonald. The Canadian-born writer, who created the Lew Archer mystery series, died in 1983 of – what else? – Alzheimer's.

Jokel says that she has seen good results from having patients relearn lost vocabulary as soon as cognitive impairment is noticed. "When it is relevant to their lives, they can relearn words and retain them with practice."

One of her patients, she says, was delighted to re-learn the lost word "muffin" so that he no longer had to point when he went to Tim Hortons.

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